ZIGGY'S SUMMER HOLIDAY
In July 1973, a week after announcing Ziggy Stardust’s retirement, David Bowie flew to France to record an album of 60s-era cover versions. Although the resulting Pin Ups remains the dark horse of his 1970s catalogue, it captures Bowie at his most relaxed, and his right-hand man Mick Ronson at the height of his powers. Even Starmen need to come down to earth now and then.
Consider David Bowie’s gravity-defying release schedule of the early 1970s: Hunky Dory, December 1971. Ziggy Stardust, June 1972. Aladdin Sane, April
1973. Even by the standards of the era, that’s prolific. Then consider that all three are classics, two of them regulars on Greatest Albums round-ups. Then throw in constant touring, press and the day-to-day of trying to live up to lofty accolades such as “brilliant songwriter”, “darkling prophet” and “TS Eliot with a beat”. Bowie may not have been ready to ‘kick it in the head when he was twenty-five” (he was 26), but he sure needed a breather to recharge his creative batteries. His idea of a break was a walk down Memory Lane – in this case Wardour Street in London’s Soho – to a time when he was a mod teen at the Marquee club, soaking up sounds by his favourite bands, such as The Pretty Things, Pink Floyd, Them, The Yardbirds and The Who. Bowie planned to repay the debt of inspiration with an album of cover versions. And really, he’d already been indulging his fanboy tendencies with homage songs to Warhol, Dylan and the Velvets. There was also Let’s Spend The Night Together on Aladdin Sane. Even the Ziggy Stardust character was a kind of mash-up tribute to Iggy Pop and Vince Taylor.
The vacation began on a dramatic note. On July 3, 1973, Bowie closed out an 18-month world tour at Hammersmith Odeon. There had been triumphs along the way (two sold-out nights at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, later turned into a live album) and disappointments (more than a few venues in America’s heartland were half-empty, audiences lukewarm to a flamehaired
After killing Ziggy and breaking up the band, David Bowie holed up in a French castle to record an album of fan-pleasing, critic-baiting 60s covers. This is the inside story of Pin Ups’ creation.
androgynous alien). If the Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide finale at Hammersmith didn’t make it clear enough, Bowie famously announced: “This is not only the last show of the tour, it’s the last show we’ll ever do.”
Explaining himself to the NME that summer, Bowie said of Ziggy: “The star was created; he worked, and that’s all I wanted him to do. Anything he did now would just be repetition, carrying it on to the death. Now he’s up there, there would be very little point in doing anything else with him.”
If fans were shocked, imagine how the Spiders From Mars felt. Bowie’s manager Tony Defries informed guitarist Mick Ronson and pianist Mike Garson that they would be joining Bowie and producer Ken Scott the following week for recording sessions in France. Drummer Woody Woodmansey was fired – on the day of his wedding, in fact – and replaced by Aynsley Dunbar.
“I was officiating at Woody’s wedding and had to tell him he was let go,” Bowie’s long-time pianist Mike Garson tells Classic Rock. “I felt terrible. He was my friend. They were all my friends. But it wasn’t a personal thing with David – it was his musical restlessness. He had to stretch his wings, just like when Diana Ross left The Supremes. These people have to go on and do other things. Of course, we all take it personally. Every album of David’s I didn’t play on, I wish I played on. I took personally. But it was just him saying: ‘This is the direction I’m going in now, what I’m hearing next.’”
“It was a dreadful way to let the band go,” Suzi Ronson tells Classic Rock. “David was so cold to have done it like that. It took Woody a long time to come around, and I understand that completely. The Spiders were a fantastic band. They didn’t deserve that.”
Reportedly, an invitation was extended to Cream’s Jack Bruce to replace Trevor Bolder on bass, but Bruce declined and so Bolder stayed on. But it would be the final album for both him and Mick Ronson. On July 9, Bowie took the boat and train from London to Paris, then a limo to the Château d’Hérouville, an 18th-century castle outside the city that had been converted into a 16-track recording studio. “A studio where you could sleep, be fed, record on your own schedule and never leave the premises?” says Garson. “That was an unprecedented, amazing thing at the time. I loved it. It was a magical place.”
I“Those string parts that Mick Ronson wrote were magical.
He was a terrific natural string writer.”
Mike Garson
n the outside world in July 1973, US President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal was deepening by the day, the Soviet Mars 5 space probe launched, and three separate commercial jets crashed in the space of a month. Almost symbolically, legendary actress Veronica Lake,
whose coiffed look Bowie had borrowed for
Hunky Dory, died the same week the Pin Ups sessions started.
Meanwhile, in the idyllic world of the Château, it was all nostalgia and sunshine, cigarettes and coffee. And rock’n’roll. Each morning, Bowie and Ronson spun a couple of 45s from Bowie’s collection for the band to listen to. They’d learn the songs, gather in the George Sand Studio, located in the Château’s converted stables, and bash them out to tape. “Most of the basic tracks were captured on the second or third take,” Garson says, “and often David would get his vocal on the first take.”
During the three weeks at the Château, visitors including Nico, Mick Rock, Ava Cherry, Suzi Fussey (the Spiders’ hair stylist, later Ronson’s wife) and Lulu (who recorded covers of Watch That Man and The Man Who Sold The World while she was there) lent the proceedings a convivial vibe.
“Meals were eaten family-style in the large kitchen,” Suzi Ronson recalls. “There was a pool outside the Château that wildlife had taken over, so no one was going in.
The studio was great.
The control room had a window seat that looked out over the courtyard.
The rooms were French country style – not huge, but comfortable. The whole place was made of stone, so it was cold. Mick and I didn’t care. It was where we first got together, so it was a little like our honeymoon.”
The Château’s chef entertained everyone with his nightly impressions of Charlie Chaplin, and there was a green Cadillac with a driver on hand for anyone game for nightly jaunts to the Malibu Club or Crazy Horse in Paris. Ken Scott and his assistant Andy always stayed behind and played pinball, occasionally returning to the control room for further tinkering on the tapes of the final Hammersmith gig, planned as a live album (tentatively titled Bowie-ing Out). Bowie mostly kept to himself, reading the newspaper and working on songs for his ambitious next project, a musical based on George Orwell’s novel 1984. Ronson was usually at the dining room piano, with a felt-tip pen and manuscript paper, working on his next arrangement.
And on Pin Ups, it’s Ronson who shines the brightest. His arrangements are inventive and startlingly modern in places, especially on the two centrepieces: See Emily Play (Pink Floyd’s second single) and Sorrow (a hit for The Merseys in ’66).
The first is a whirlwind of dramatic scene shifts, from bass and one-finger piano to power chords and vari-speeded vocal harmonies, to interludes of dissonant noise and a modern string quartet. It plays like a forecast to the cut-and-paste music of Beck and Radiohead 25 years later.
Sorrow threads its spare elegance around a single cello line, back beat and layer-cake vocal harmonies. Again, there’s a prescience about it. In the moment where Bowie’s singing: ‘With your long blonde hair, I didn’t sleep last night,’ one can almost hear the DNA for Raspberry Beret-era Prince.
“I knew when we did these arrangements that no one would get them,” Garson says with a chuckle. “And I still didn’t care. David and Mick didn’t care. I think it’s undeniable that David affected Prince, Beck, Kate Bush, all these artists. You can hear his influence everywhere today.
And those string parts that Mick wrote were magical. He was a terrific natural string writer.
The fact that he wasn’t trained served him well, because he thought outside the usual boxes that arrangers think in. His guitar playing was tremendous, of course, so lyrical and strong.
“He was the perfect foil for David. Those of us who knew him weren’t surprised by the depth of his talents, but I think the public didn’t know, and still don’t. Just a once-in-a-generation talent.”
“Writing and arranging music came very easily to him,” says Suzi Ronson. “David trusted him and didn’t interfere with the process. I loved that about David. He was open to other people’s ideas, and when Mick came along, what a gift for David. He was so lucky to have found such a talented musician. Lucky for Mick, too. He found someone whose music inspired him. David’s music was calling out for Mick, and Mick did not disappoint.”
That summer, Ronno was also being groomed by Bowie’s manager Tony Defries for a solo career, which may have caused some ripples between him and Bowie. But if so, it’s certainly not apparent on the album. Pin Ups is often dismissed for being frivolous and light, but that’s a big part of its charm, especially sandwiched between the seriousness of Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs.
Ronson made it easy for Bowie to clown around behind the mic in a way that he never had before, and never would again in quite the same playful way. Rosalyn, Here Comes The Night, Friday On My Mind,they all capture the singer at his most looselimbed and freewheeling. Significantly though,
“People say it was just a stopgap album, but it was a genius idea.”
Mike Garson
the album ends with The Kinks’ cranky Where Have All The Good Times Gone. Like Davies, Bowie had a pessimistic bent that never squared with the 60s’ sunny optimism. The run-out message of Pin Ups seems to be: “This has been fun, but time to move on now.” Much too fast to take that test indeed.
It turned out that 1973 was the year of the covers album. In June, Harry Nilsson had released A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night, a collection of Tin Pan Alley standards recorded with Sinatra’s arranger Gordon
Jenkins. Laura Nyro put out Gotta Be A Miracle, remaking Brill Building-era pop. John Lennon had begun the dark odyssey of Rock ’N’ Roll with Phil Spector. But treading much closer to Bowie’s stylistic turf was Bryan Ferry, who was halfway through recording his own covers of English pop for These Foolish Things.
There are differing reports of how Ferry’s anger over the competing project played out. Some say he asked his label, Island Records, to file an injunction to prevent RCA from rush-releasing
Pin Ups. Others say he bombarded Bowie with telegrams and calls at the Château d’Hérouville. Bowie certainly hadn’t forgotten Ferry’s comment to the press about how, in concert, David liked to “push all his band back, like props in their little boxes”. Either way, both sides agreed to let it be.
Released on October 19, Pin Ups entered the UK chart at No.1, with Bowie’s three previous albums lingering nearby at 13, 19 and 16 respectively (he was the best-selling album artist of the year). Led by its first single, Sorrow, it shipped 147,000 copies, then continued to sell 30,000 a week through Christmas. “It’s the kind of music your parents will never let you play loud enough!” teased the tagline on RCA’s ad campaign, and fans loved it.
Critics were less enthused. Rolling Stone said: “Even in 1965, any of a thousand bands could have done better.” NME said: “David Bowie should know well enough not to succumb to everyone else’s idea of how-to-make-your-next-album.” John Peel said: “I’ll be glad when Bryan Ferry and David Bowie get this oldies business out of their normally diverting systems.”
Because it’s covers, Pin Ups will never have the artistic heft of Bowie’s other 70s albums, but it remains an energetic and highly charming throwaway, a kind of glossy Pop Art reassembly of 60s singles. Spending five months on the chart, it gave Bowie the respite he needed to plot his next move. The 1984 musical was scrapped after Orwell’s widow denied Bowie the rights, and its apocalyptic visions were folded into what was essentially Ziggy’s epilogue, Diamond Dogs. It was the last straight-up rock album that Bowie would make. Just ahead lay Philly soul, chilly Krautrock and the Berlin trilogy.
Bowie tipped his hand that summer by telling the NME: “The rock business has become so established, and so much like a society, that I have revolted against it. That’s what wasn’t liked; that I won’t take it seriously, and I’ll break its rules, and I won’t listen to it, and I won’t take much notice of it. It doesn’t worry me.”
Although he was too restless to see it through, Pin Ups was planned as a two-part release, with the second leaning on covers of American music, such as the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer In The City, the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows and the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. The version of Bruce Springsteen’s Growing Up that surfaced later as a bonus track hints at what might have been. Mike Garson, who has been leading a worldwide tour of alumni musicians called the Bowie Celebration, says: “Over the years, David talked about doing a Pin Ups 2, even as late as 2002, but it didn’t happen. There were a lot of projects that we never got to
– a Broadway show, Outside 2 and 3, a big-band album where we’d rearrange the least-known song on each of his albums.
“But I think the original Pin Ups has been overlooked for too long. That’s why I put Sorrow in the set for this tour. People say it was just a stopgap album, but it was a genius idea, another change of direction in his seventies story. I want every Bowie fan, new and old, to listen – or relisten – to it. It’s just more proof that his creativity never stopped.”
“I knew no one would get the arrangements.
We didn’t care.”
Mike Garson